Not Necessarily a Movie Review: Back to the BlastBerry

“It’s a keyboard on a screen on a keyboard” — Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis talking about the BlackBerry Storm

Watching Air, a version of Nike’s Michael Jordan sneaker breakthrough, raised my heartbeat and made me wish I’d been even a very small part of it.

Watching BlackBerry, a version of BlackBerry’s rise and fall, raised my blood pressure and took me back to 2013 when I was a very, very small part of it.

The movie shares the story of Mike Lazaridis & his best friend Doug (no last name, apparently) founding Research in Motion and the opportunistic Jim Balsillie who becomes their co-CEO. he had just been fired and was failing up.

There’s a bit of this “failing up” in the marketing and advertising business, and although I took the job at Publicis to co-run the BlackBerry account, I believed that I was being entrepreneurial and maybe even a touch heroic. My ego told me that I could turn around a failing icon. Did I fail up?